Updates

In 70 days the Article 50 negotiation period will expire and unless something changes, the UK will leave the European Union, with or without a deal. What happens in the next seventy days is anyone’s guess but it is sure to be the greatest crisis of the British state in modern history.

Chaos reigns supreme at Westminster. In the largest ever defeat of a British government, the Tory deal negotiated over the last two years has been blown off the table.

Scottish Greens co-convenor Patrick Harvie MSP has said that a timetable for a Scottish independence vote is now essential, even if the Prime Minister agrees to extend the Article 50 deadline.

Harvie used his slot at FMQs today (17 Jan 2019) to restate the Greens’ support for a People’s Vote to remain in the EU, as well as backing the First Minister’s pledge to say more on the timing of an independence vote in the coming weeks.

Greens have slammed other parties for ignoring the evidence on climate change after they blocked calls to speed up renewable energy and oil and gas decommissioning in a Scottish Parliament debate today (15 Jan 19).

SNP, Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MSPs voted against Mark Ruskell’s amendment which urged an accelerated energy transition in response to the most recent warnings of catastrophic climate change.

Back in 2016, few people could have predicted quite how chaotic the Brexit crisis would become.

But it’s not only a crisis in parliamentary debating chambers and government institutions. The toxic values which have been cultivated and unleashed by the Brexit cause have been spilling out in far more public ways, and this week many people began to take notice.

Scottish Ministers today (10 Jan) agreed to a Green MSP's call to look into the threat of increased people-trafficking as a result of the UK Government's proposed post-Brexit immigration system.

The current system for ‘third country’ or non-EEA nationals, defined by the Conservatives’ ‘hostile environment’ policies, has been found to make tackling human trafficking harder and is regularly exploited by traffickers. With the extension of this system to cover some 450 million European nationals, expectations are that the number of human trafficking victims in the UK could increase.

Scottish Greens local government spokesperson Andy Wightman MSP has blasted Finance Secretary Derek Mackay for continuing to mask multi-million budget cuts with ‘smoke and mirrors’ on local government funding.

Grilling the Finance Secretary at the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government and Communities Committee today (9 January 2019), Mr Wightman highlighted that the true extent of ringfenced funding to councils for national commitments is far greater than Ministers claim, resulting in hundreds of millions of pounds in real terms cuts.